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By Root 1255 0

In this meeting with the press, she awed the nation with the outcome of her personal crusade to bring the mightiest government agency and one of the world’s largest corporations to heel. In her brief, she stressed her role as the mastermind of the scheme that exposed the existence of an illegal prisoner within the system, who had marshaled her most trusted officers and advisers into a fearless thrust to dismantle the power network knitted by Hypnos and the DHS. As commander in chief, she extolled the courage of General Erlenmeyer in obeying her direct orders to secure the Capitol grounds. On January 20, 2061, she was inaugurated for a second term after winning by a landslide. Since the Constitutional amendment of 2033 had extended the number of terms a president could serve to three, four years later, in 2064, she won her third and final mandate.

In the wake of her public disclosure, 117 public servants and officers were served subpoenas to appear before a Senate special committee. Every one of them was dismissed from public office and left after having signed their confessions and sundry documents to guarantee their discretion.

Lukas Hurley received a commendation and, shortly after, emigrated to Peru, where he lives with his wife, Elena, and their twin daughters, Eva and Rosa. Elena’s relatives help the Hurleys run their ten-thousand-acre estate of pastures and farmland.

After an extraordinary session of the ad hoc Special Hibernation Committee, it was decreed that Odelle Marino’s ashes should be placed in a specially constructed hermetic urn and suspended in tank 913 of the Washington, D.C., hibernation facility for a period of one hundred years. Shortly after, President Hurst signed an order to confiscate all of Odelle’s possessions, but it became apparent that her ill-gotten fortune had disappeared the same morning of her suicide from a numbered account at Banca Fleishmann in Antigua. Although the SWIFT organization cooperated fully to track the funds, they hit a dead end. Following six rapid transfers, the money reached Gibraltar and then branched outside the SWIFT system to accounts in Liechtenstein and the Isle of Man. Onward from these two points, the funds vanished.

Harper Tyler retired to his pig farm with Antonio Salinas and enlarged the operations by purchasing adjacent land. A month later he descended into the Washington sewers to look for a boy, whom he found suffering from a fractured leg. After a brief passage through a clinic to set his leg and diagnose his condition, Joshua—aka Metronome—adjourned to the farm, where he receives special tutoring from a score of newfound uncles and two remedial teachers. In his spare time, he helps his newly adopted father in the layout and construction of a huge 0-gauge model railway in the cellar. James Marshall—aka Barandus—runs an expanded O’Malley Cleaning Services and offers fluid-management consultancy.

The American government slapped an unheard-of two-hundred-billion-dollar fine on Vinson Duran, the owner of Hypnos. To cover the fine, Vinson had to relinquish his majority shareholding. The money, in full, served to pay compensation to the center inmates and to bankroll two foundations: Theta, for the research of hibernation technology, and HMA (Hibernation Monitoring Agency), to oversee the operation of suspension centers with an army of independent inspectors drawn from the ranks of retired government officers. The United States Congress enacted a bill, later transformed into law, to partially nationalize Hypnos and supervise its board by appointing a chief executive officer nominated by Congress. After an absence of two years, Vinson Duran returned to the limelight by founding a corporation to research full-body transplants.

Laurel Cole moved in with Floyd Carpenter after dating for more than a year. Following Dr. Carpenter’s appointment to run Theta, they married, and soon after Laurel gave birth to their daughter Eryn. Raul Osborne took a year’s sabbatical, during which he traveled throughout Europe. On his return to the United States, he teamed